The Irrationality—LB Roland

This, this is the hour of quickening
when the mind, pushed forth to the wall of sleep,
strikes and strikes through the mask,
and this, blackbox jettisoned from my contemporaries’ abortive culture,
is that wall, and on that wall is the writing,
the ever-dancing, ever-whoring WORD.
And here and now on the threshold of a dream
as the nonce and circumstance of what’s beyond
wafts forth dancing on my bastard, wresting eyes,
the damned, darning cobbler in my mind
jolts forth to read the daily news, and this is what he read:

a rattlesnake-mug drinking, steel-mohawked, tacky-suited, wearing a The-Price-is-Right-yellow-price-tag-name-tag, rubber-chicken squeezing, Mardi-Gras-beed toting, blue-LED-eyed, white skeletal, wacky late-night sidekick
fumbling at ill-wrought lines, dancing through the bits that should never have started, and stooping to sad slapstick antics. Michael Cane as a kangaroo, Arnold Shwarzanager doing MacBeth, Sean Cannery singing Abba’s Take a Chance, James Mason as a teenager.

But canned laughter, familiar celebrity faces,
the sound of the easy, soft-jazz, lite-rock, pop-rap, indie-mainstream musical trio’s air,
and espresso-strength distilled, current-event buzzword-headline in-jokes
all coat our faces in a mask of inconsequence
though for the failed plugs, the blatanly missed cues, and that the
disinterested-sold-out host is hardly even phoning it in.
I sit up wide awake when normally
the existential angst and total crushing dread
of personal responsibility would fill my sould
only this is there.

And I strain to see some principle or agency
in the minstrel show before me:
can I trace this back to the motley sycophantic mime-dance
that filled every banquet hall in the feudal age
to the traveling troupe of gypsies, to early vaudeville?
Are we, the American individual, the Hobbesian-Leviathan-king
of our free and sovereign nation?
Have the powers been inverted from the feudal to democratic,
and so the blind and mad bearded king sits regal in the collective easy chair of america.

But no.
I cannot.

It is fat-cat, deep-pocket, hook-nosed, (that’s-right-Jew-stereotype), capitalistically-patronised, lowest-common-denominator, masturbatory, inter-Hollywood entertainment
that unassumingly creeps into the Marxist-wretched-massive-labour-force’s hovel’s musky-dank pit of a bedroom to whisper sweet-nothing-advertisements into the impressionable, somnambulistic ears of the many.
But this is not the terrifying leviathan that I thought I saw writhing beyond the LED-wall, it is a rheumatic, twitching, limp lamprey latched to the throat of the everyman.
it’s just sad
this is the whimper, the prolonged and self-imploding whimper… Boom.

It started in a green shade.
Green for purity? shade for ignorance?
It is the spring. It is the digital age.
Is this the beginning? Or more likely, the end?
Is it our sense of the end? I mean
is it that a generation recognising the sins of our fathers
sees that we must pay? And then realising
that we stand on the precipice of nothing, are forced
to inject nostalgia for present or even the future in our lives.
Nostalgia for the future so well foretold in chrome dreams
in grey shades, by the sage scifi sinners of our time.
Are the black industrial alleyways of Bladerunner
and the white modern interiors of 2001
the only futures that exist?
How can a child dream when there is no man [sic] on the moon?
Sure, a robot on Mars is neat,
but hasn’t the whole Red Planet thing been played out.
Does it really matter what’s in the red rocks,
if we’ve already considered every possibility?
Can’t we just watch C3PO and R2D2 stumbling across Tatooine
if it’s only reticulated carbon-fibre that embraces the world.
It may as all just be fiction if we can’t place the human form in the future.

“Like the legend of the phoenix,
all ends with beginnings.
What keeps the planet spinning?
The force of the beginning.”

Like the postexam undergraduate,
the homeless man parties.
What keeps him on this corner?
The bass of some new single.

“We’ve
come too far
to give up
who we are.”

He’s
lost it all
but this bag
and his hat.

“So let’s
raise the bar
and our cups
to the stars.”

So he
raised his face
and his cup
to my eyes.

“The present has no living.
Your gift keeps on giving.
What is this I’m feeling?
If you wanna leave, I’m ready.”

The beat pulsing through his body,
he assures my gift won’t harm
though I can tell he’s not lucid
and the bar is just a few feet away.

“We’re up all night to get lucky.”

He’s up all night to keep living.

“We’re up all night to get lucky.”

He’s up all night to keep living.

“We’re up all night to get lucky.”

He’s up all night to keep living.

“We’re up all night to get lucky.”

He’s up all night to keep living.

To be clear, I am with you, though I walk in the night.

Another winter walk consumes my time tonight
not fully knowing what it is I’m doing I disembark.
Running wide eyed across the street I feel
the trail of relativity selves strung along
like a string of paper dolls of residue in place
struck by the deterministic cars ploughing downtown.
The causal chain being wiped out, only a cord
ties me to my past. Those cars I have seen on summer nights
when I called them rain drops falling on the city,
and here tonight I am on the other side of the road
in the freezing night air on this crust of grass lingering.
Leather glove on hand, smoke in gloved fingers,
staring at the soon to be black ice, I now realise
That I could not have been more right. Turning to the ravine
with a flair of my greatcoat, I break the cigarette.

In the ravine the tunnel funnels the wind into my face;
a glow of sting illuminates my flesh. And the skin
reaching the ambient temperature permits a perfect permeation.
I pass a professor’s house, snug upon the hill
with no outwards sign suggesting a life of finite group theory.
Under the bridge in the dirt I read the murals of Our Time,
“Boobies” sprawled in beautiful blacklister extols our want.
For a moment I stop and stoop at the street and see each brick
perfectly cast for its own slot: “Nelsonville Block Co.”
Ah! I have the same model back home!
I think now how far the brick has travelled, and of each time
that I have travelled past abandoned stores and strained my neck
to catch a glimpse of the ruins set back on the mountain
where once clay was scraped and baked into these blocks
and ignobly boxed and shipped to lie here stained in the mud.

Rising, I hear the trees shrieking above me
black branches, claws, tearing the clouded sky.
No, they are only rubbing one another, they do touch
though I have written before that they didn’t need
even to brace one another. Bark on bark, trees fucking
howl into the night. Through the bare boughs
I discern the moon and a lowly satellite, no it’s Jupiter
the evening star (which it is not) a portent of some minor
blip in the nothingness of Our Time. I merely wish…

Moving on, I scamper; slowly the warmth of insensitivity
spreads to every limb. The house fronts are each a tale.
Call me Ishmael wandering my own New Bedford
Buffeted, bedraggled, outcast of my own volition,
and these faces tell me what it is I’m sent out for,
the perfect image. The eternal metaphor, the final story
The perfect prayer, the words, the truth. God, my God.
This house has each window lighted, and that one is dark
and one is being exited now, for each a year, a day
I could not even write it. And here I am, 0 degrees.
There a girl in a car, idling, on a side street’s shade;
what are you waiting for? Sex, yes always that,
and then here it comes, the insuppressible thought
the unspoken, the feared, the reason I set out tonight.

Why? Why do I say “I love her”? There are always girls, yes,
but did I choose her? Was it proximity alone, no not that,
Then Ah! Then, in the tower, meeting, the way she hugged,
more with her pelvis then her arms. How our crotches met
long before our minds, though the minds keep in touch.
How in nights like these she’d come closer and warm her hands
in mine. Did she mean to? Was it all meant to bring me in,
or is it just her way? A flirtatious, bouncing, bubbling girl
trying hard to get loved, cast a wide net, and caught
some sad-eyed mackerel with that one bluefin tuna.
When my eyes rise from this reverie, a grey-stoned church.

A chill, a shock, the thought of her, the sight of the cornerstone,
I cross myself, and the words come to my dry lips
“Yea, though I shall walk through the shadow of the valley of death,”
And “Thy will be done,” and “the Lord is my shepherd,”
and “Why my Lord, have You forsaken me?”
And I recall an Easter mass when I played Jesus
and had to say in Hevrew, “Eli, Eli…” but the words aren’t mine,
and though I strive to pull out the ones that are mine,
they ain’t there. And so my most common prayer comes out,
“God, give me the words that I am looking for.”

I move on, and turning a corner I see two windows open to the world.
Within each is a light and a person, on the right a man
seated working at his electrical, mechanical, chemical engineering
above him a greased and golden spread-eagle figure hangs.
In the left window is the girl in pyjamas reading a book,
the tragedy of the suburbs is not sameness, but the illusion of sameness.
Surely could this girl see this man’s true desires, she’d spit, yet
he, in meeting her in class, could successfully mount her.
He is not The Niceguy, he is a whore of a man.
And I think of my parents, how they inhabited these same rooms,
how my father must have lied through his teeth,
how my mother missed it, and how I am the tragedy
of halfassed and horny courting in a cheap world.

I say I go out on these nights because they look the same
as summer nights, clear, bright, but the cold repulses
all but the willing hearted, and only they deserve
poetry. And who did I see: a girl jump out of a car
half naked saying: “I love you,” I’ve heard that before.
A delivery man man unprepared rooting for the address.
A homeless woman at Ruby Tuesday smoking in her greatcoat
watching the exterior TV which never switches off.
And as I trace my way home I recall first setting out
and see that I have tied a little knot in the night with my presence
and that somehow something was worked out.

God, give me the words for her, and save the children.

I’ll light the hookah while you place the cactus
in the jar that you bought today.

“Ohio,” you say, played at the market
but all you could sing was “one raped”

“This isn’t my first rodeo,” you say,
you’ve cultivated cacti before.

“Yes but my room was drier than death valley,
and as unpeopled, no irrigation to be found.”

While I imagine aqueducts in your armour,
I realise: you parched a cactus to death.

This time you’ve given it a vaster vase
and marvelled at each marble in its bed

only then casting stones to stand
near it on the sand and half sunk, let it drink.

You think its different this time,
and it is at first, the cactus centrally sits:

All states, we princes, the river flows
around the domed raised earth.

Then creeps the cactus to the circumference,
dust, crumbs corrode the pearled pebbles.

And then the hordes of time ride and
sweep away one third of the green spirit.

That night you cried, “cactus, come back!”
to the dark flaccid rind toppled,

and I must be mohel-exorcist to this node
with my sinister hand, and dextrously comfort you.

Then, you paint its pot yellow, “get well soon,”
spurning the vacant spot with new rocks.

One night you, infantilely drunk, embrace it
protesting at the prickles, you squeak.

I show you how you must move slowly
past the spines to know its aloe-heart,

But you disbelieve in my horticultural life
an intimacy with extremophiles.

Perhaps you’ll learn to let this one grow.

If my life a bath
well you do the math, 
all the water you would displace. 
My heart would rise
buoyant with its size
each time I’ve seen your face. 

“Give me a lever large
and the world I’ll dislodge,” 
once said a man very clever. 
My world ‘tis you; 
the things I could do, 
if my love ‘twere such a lever

If lovers and levers
and all their endeavours
Have failed, then so shall I too.
We two shall soon part, 
but with fulcrum, my heart,
I wish my words would move you.

whiskeymonologues:

Late night, I meet her
for riblets and flirtinis.
I go home hungry.

My love is a river running low,
and she an antelope pack
come to drink at our friendship’s flow
not seeing the croc there lying flat,
nor the spines of his famished back.
she lowers the neck of one of her does.
Unnoticed, it drags her down by her nap
and rolls over to consume her below.
Her herd’s bull doesn’t know
of the loss of hooves and snouts,
so returns each summer’s drought.
And if in some vague thanks,
wades out to stream from the bank
looks into the murk and lows.

I drift off from writing and sit on my hands
admiring how the colour of the carpet
is not at all the colour of any part of you.
Admiring, how that among these book
none are named “you” or “her”
makes me think how few books I have.
In the course of a day, even elevators
reflect some part of you closed to me.
And if luck would have us pass by, 
your eyes in the sky distract me from you.

At dinner, in some bricked confines
of laqcquered wood and human comfort
you sit maharaja with your “beaux”
and I wonder, is there a space between
Lips on glasses, fingers at napkins,
or between fork and tooth
where a thought of me can slip through, 
and you remember for a moment I exist.
And would that were a consolation to my long days.